|
|
Beyond belief Robin Yassin-Kassab's ambitious debut of faith and
faithlessness, The Road From Damascus, impresses Maya Jaggi
The
Road From Damascus "Unbelief itself is a
religion", says an epigraph to this ambitious and topical debut novel. The
words of the 12th-century Sufi sage Ahmad Yasavi, coupled with a Pascal pensée
on the limitations of atheism, open a book that satirises a kind of secular
fundamentalism that can, it suggests, be as blinding as dogma. In early 21st-century Damascus,
Sami Traifi, a 31-year-old "failed academic and international
layabout" born in Britain to Syrian parents, truffles among ancestral
roots for a credible thesis for his stalled doctorate. Instead he stumbles on a
family secret, an uncle broken by 22 years in a Syrian torture jail. Back in
London, Sami's marriage to a teacher, Muntaha, crumbles as the astute, educated
daughter of a refugee from Saddam's Iraq resolves to wear a hijab. Trained
to despise religion by his late father Mustafa, an Arab nationalist supporter
of the crackdown on Syria's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, Sami is already
estranged from his mother Nur, whose earlier decision to cover her hair he sees
as a betrayal of his dying father's beliefs. Secular humanism, he fears, was an
antiquated daydream shared by many modernising Arabs. "The fort had
already fallen. In its rubble a marketplace of religion had set up." Yet
for all his quoting of great poets, the simplistic nature of Sami's
understanding is signalled from the outset. Always, for him, "issues returned
to hijabs and beards". In a crisis of confusion and
self-loathing, Sami disappears on a bender, missing his father-in-law's
funeral, before a spell in the cells for possessing a spliff prompts a bout of
self-cleansing and a "trembling, contingent faith". But his own Damascene
conversion in 2001 coincides with September 11 - as we know, with heavy
dramatic irony, that it will. Once apprehended for having a rolled-up fiver in
his nose, Sami is now caught emerging from a Brick Lane mosque in a beard. With
absurd comic logic, the police conclude he has a false identity, since the
pious beardie and the coked-up dissolute cannot be one and the same. The agents
of the free world are as unable to distinguish between "Wahhabi
nihilists" and the harmlessly spiritual as between diverse forms of
political Islam. At the novel's heart are a
devastating act of betrayal in the name of secularist progress, and the family
reconciliation that comes with Sami's dawning realisation that faith is not synonymous with
backwardness, nor secularism with humanism. Muntaha, with her hijab and
prayers, proves more humane, not least in her treatment of Sami's bereft mother
- and is by far the most compelling character. Her loving correction of her
Islamist kid brother's know-nothing political posturing is among the most
touching scenes. Yet the attempt to portray a
sprawling multicultural London in the vein of White Teeth, from Nur's halal
butcher on the Harrow Road to Edgware Road's Arab cafes, is less successful.
The first-novel impulse to chuck everything in threatens to swamp the plot.
While hip-hop Islamism and a university riot over a subcontinental
anti-religious provocateur are richly germane, excursions into "reclaim
the streets" anti-globalisation demonstrations or pyramid schemes are less
so. The British-Hungarian artist Gabor Vronk, a would-be Vronsky romancing
Sami's wife, is a straw man set up to embody a predatory orientalism
("Arabs are either sensuous or violent, or both"). The novel is most
alive in its more intimate exchanges, and in glimmers of a gentle and vital
wisdom that outshines the satirical fireworks. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,2285452,00.html |
||
